The Mind's Eye

From the people who brought you the Star Trek edition of Monopoly and the Star Trek edition of Risk, it is the Star Trek edition of The Manchurian Candidate. Angela Lansbury is a Klingon. Henry Silva is a Romulan. And John Champion is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being you have ever known in your life. Also, Geordi does stuff. Find out what when we put The Mind’s Eye in the Mission Log. Haven’t listened to the podcast yet, but I’m giggling madly over this week’s episode description. Well done! I think there’s a Spoiler alert needed for the trivia, John. 😉 There’s a reason that the voice was uncredited. On first viewing 25 years ago, almost nobody caught the voice. The holy $ !@ moment that is coming should not be ruined. I’d beg to differ – I recall Usenet and dialup bulletin board systems were awash with people pointing out that this sounded an awful lot like…the person…who did the voice… who used to be on the show… he said quarter-century-later-spoilerlessly. Pssst! Darth Vader has children… The Statue of Liberty has a cameo… and Sherlock is Khaaaaaaaaan!!! The problem pointed out – that a lot of the externally-caused-mind-effery that goes on in TNG – really only becomes a problem when you take into account the sheer number of times that this happened in TNG. “Mental possession” was done far, far, far too often for my tastes on TNG. It was a novelty, probably rolled out too soon, in Lonely Among Us (I say too soon because we’d just met Picard maybe five weeks ago and already he seems to be losing his marbles). By the time we get to The Host, Power Play, etc. etc., it’s happened a LOT. “Mental possession” is to TNG what “parallel Earths” was to TOS: too much, too close together (and it’s a fallback plotline that got even more prevalent in DS9 and Voyager). It happens so often in TNG, one has to imagine that there’s a public safety poster, next to the required OSHA posters down in the rec room, about how to spot the signs of a crewmate being controlled by an outside force. So, in early TNG, we get “you’re back on duty next shift, everything checks out!”, but starting with TNG season 4, there are Consequences. Go to France, get in a dust-up with your brother, book some sessions with Deanna, you name it – suddenly we’re NOT doing “you’re back on duty next shift!” and it’s a jarring gear-shift. From a production standpoint, I get the appeal of “mental possession” stories: it lets the regular cast stretch their acting muscles and keep from getting bored (you know what else helps with that? decent scripts!), it gets you a new character without having to hire a new guest actor, and the cognitive dissonance (see also: Beverly bedding down with Riker/Odan in The Host, or…pretty much everything that happens in Conundrum) can sometimes be fun. But it also got really old for me. [Character X]’s body is being taken over again? Eh…is Babylon 5 on yet? Highlander maybe? (I know the lynch mob will be lining up for me for saying that, but mid-20s me, in the ’90s, was thinking exactly that. Although both of those shows also did the “mental possession” thing…very sparingly, relative to ’90s Trek. Bet this never happened on Supertrain.) That being said, Mind’s Eye is one of the better specimens of that plotline. Geordi was the character I connected with most during the show’s run, fantastic social awkwardness, inadvisable attempts to meet women and all, and it really didn’t sit well with me seeing him tortured and then seeing, potentially, him dealing with the fallout from this episode on a long-term basis. Lonely Among Us, Conspiracy, Power Play, Conundrum, Mind’s Eye, Schizoid Man, hmmm cant think of anymore..episodes where a body gets possessed or ? The sheer number of times it happens to Data is disturbing (Schizoid Man, Brothers, Masks, Power Play, A Fistful of Datas, Descent, Phantasms, Insurrection) – someone ELSE needs to reset his router password. Include Clues (Deanna is taken over), arguably Identity